Egypt e-invoice (ETA) — the practical checklist

ETA e-invoicing is the single biggest compliance shift in Egypt in 20 years. Here is the practical checklist — the one that survives contact with reality.

Before you sign anything

• Confirm your tax-registration number and electronic signature certificate are valid.
• Confirm your ERP has the production ETA token, not just sandbox.
• Confirm the supplier’s “ETA support” includes return-flow handling, not just invoice issuance.

In the first two weeks of go-live

• Reconcile every issued invoice to the ETA portal daily, not weekly.
• Watch for character-encoding bugs (Arabic descriptions, in particular item names with parentheses).
• Have a manual fallback procedure documented. You will need it at least once.

What surprises everyone

The ETA portal accepts the invoice. Then 6 hours later, it rejects it asynchronously and your ERP does not know. Your nightly reconciliation must look at the acceptance status, not just the submission acknowledgment.

What we ship

Smart ERP + Smart POS handle all of this. So do other reputable systems. The point of this article is that ETA is not just a feature flag — it is a workflow change.